Thursday, February 20, 2014

BW Modeling Tools (for SAP HANA BW)

Whole SAP development world is moving away of SAP GUI. This trend is
obvious. ABAP developers can develop their programs in Eclipse for quite
some time already. See details e.g. FAQs
- ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse. SAP HANA Studio which supports
developing of HANA’s artefacts like Attribute/Analytic/Calculation Views, DB
schemas, tables, sequences, procedures, table types etc. is also based in
Eclipse. It was obvious that soon or later BW will get also possibility of
developing its objects outside native SAP GUI’s RSA1 transaction and/or outside
BEx Query Designer tool.

I remember back
in 2009 there were rumors that next “big tool of BW” will be based in
Eclipse. Logically it should be successor of Visual Composer (VC) which was/is
based in Eclipse also. After VC there is another tool SAP
BusinessObjects Design Studio also based in Eclipse. Design Studio is tool
for creation of analysis applications and dashboards based on BW/HANA/Universe
based data sources for browsers and mobile devices.

On other
hand purpose of BW Modeling Tools is to support modeling of BW’s InfoProviders
such as "CompositeProvider" and "Open
ODS View". CompProv and Open ODS Views are newly introduced objects
which came with SAP
NetWeaver 7.40 SP5. The tool further supports consumption of SAP HANA Views
in BW Models.

In order to
use the tool you need few plugins to be installed into the SAP HANA Studio:

Installation guide for Modelling Tools is available on SMP here (S*
ID required).

Personally I’m very looking forward to “united” developer IDE where all
kin dof SAP objects can be developed. On other hand I think I’ll be nostalgic
for all the transaction in SAP GUI like SE80, SE38/37 and so on.

PS: explanation of new terms:

CompProv – in this new type of object it is possible to merge
data from classic BW InfoProviders with data from SAP HANA models using Union
and Join or just merge BW data. See the details here.

You can only use this new CompositeProvider if you are using a SAP HANA
database.

Open ODS Views – You can define
BW data models using it for integration of existing BW objects (DataSources) without
the need to create InfoObjects. Open ODS View represents BW metadata of BW
structures. While not having InfoObjects high level of consistency of the data
model is not guaranteed. On other hand you can change the model much more
quickly comparing to the model with InfoObjects. Also it has no separate storage
of master and transaction data. See the details here.

-Update
02/05/2016 –

BW
Modeling Tools are usually referred by abbreviation BWMT

-Update
12/07/2017 –

Current
version for ABAP and BW tools updated. For details see here
for BW Modeling Tools and here
for ABAP tools.

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About Me

Working as a Business Intelligence consultant (at percept ltd.) in SAP area specializing on SAP NetWeaver (BW, BI). Certified as SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence consultant. From Bratislava, Slovakia.
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